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And now a brief summary of suggestions, in which I will address myself directly to the teacher.

At the outset, make the student feel that the Latin language was once
an every-day tongue of men, women, and children; a tongue
in which people not only wrote books, but dined, and played tennis;
a language spoken, and understood
as spoken. Direct him, therefore, to aim to associate meaning
with the sound of the word, not merely with groups of letters on a page.
Tell him, as he commits his vocabulary to memory, to lift his eye from
the printed word, and repeat again and again, in imagination, the spoken
word, so that when he hears it from his teacher, he will feel its force
immediately.

Throughout the introductory lesson-book, conduct the translation of
the review and of the advance at hearing, and, in the same way, have the
student, his book being closed, put the printed English
sentences into Latin as you deliver them to him. If you do
this from the first, he will be able, by the time the lesson-book is finished,
to express a sentence of considerable length in Latin, grasping it as a
whole, instead of turning one word into Latin, and then another, and so
on, in piecemeal fashion.

If you can get time for preparation, aim at repetition,
making for your own use, in connection with each lesson in the book, a
group of sentences which, employing the vocabulary already acquired, shall
proceed from change to change with but a slight difference each time.
A simple example of what I mean may be recalled from pp. 25-26.1
In this matter, — the insisting upon the value of repetition, — the Sauveur
method is quite right.

As the student learns one new use after another, say of the accusative,
help him to get a clear and practically serviceable idea of the possibilities
of range of one and another kind of word, as Caesarem, millepassuum,
annum, multum.

In a similar way, help him to classify ideas that are expressed by verbal
constructions, especially in subordinate clauses. Let him, for example,
know with perfect familiarity what two kinds of adversative ideas exist
in the nature of things, and by what mode these are respectively expressed
in Latin (of the period which he is dealing with), and with what introductory
particles. Let him know familiarly what two ideas one may have in
mind in using an antequam-construction, a dum-construction,
and so on, and how these ideas are expressed.

By the time he has finished the introductory book, he will in this way
have made the intelligent acquaintance of
very nearly all the constructions of the language, and should have them
all in working order, like familiar tools.

When you come to Caesar, do not let your class make the first plunge
alone, but for a number of days carry them through the advance yourself,
avoiding translation on your own part as far as possible, reading the Latin
to them in your very best and most helpful manner, and pointing out order
and construction. Throughout the Caesar and Cicero (I should say
precisely the same thing of the Anabasis) have the review of each
day prepared to be translated at hearing. Encourage your students
to learn to deliver the Latin well by appointing a promising reader, from
time to time, to prepare himself in advance to read the review to the class
in your stead. Let him stand at your side with his eye upon his fellow-students;
and as he finishes a sentence, or such part of a sentence as shall be best
to give in a lump, do you yourself name the student who shall translate.

Be sure that you constantly treat constructions as means of expressing
certain ideas, not as mere exemplifications of rules. And, to
enforce this view, as well as for many other reasons, watch constantly
the development of ideas in dealing with sentences which your students
have not seen before, and, in your questioning for written answers, or
for vivavoce answers, call attention to point after point in the
gradual unfolding of the meaning, demanding all the time what I have elsewhere
called "anticipatory parsing." And have a good deal of memorizing and reciting of these selected passages.

Aim to go a little beyond the lesson every day, having your class read
on, not at sight, but at hearing, this additional ground being understood
to form a part of the review at the next meeting.

The disadvantage of reading on at sight is twofold. The student
is too apt to look ahead while some one else is up, preparing himself to
make a good showing if he is called upon. And even if he does not
do this, he is too ready to run his eye to and fro in the sentence, not
really accepting the Latin order, but doing a more or less clever piece
of patchwork. It often happens to me, in dealing with students who
have been well practised in sight-reading before coming to the University,
to read aloud a sentence containing only familiar words, every one of which
they catch as it is delivered, yet fail to get any meaning from the sentence
as a whole; and I commonly find that, if I will at once put the sentence
in the very same words, but in the English order, they will comprehend
it instantly and without difficulty. That experience proves that
one may do a deal of sight-reading, yet never come to know the Latin order
in any practical way.2

Finally, no day should pass without composition.
The writing of Latin is one of the most dreary of intellectual occupations,
or one of the most delightful. Pretty uniformly it is the former
for a boy who has not written a Latin sentence from the time he finished
his elementary book and began his Caesar till, only a few months before
going to college, he took up his special book in composition for the bare
purpose of preparing for the examination in that subject. The
object of writing Latin in the preparatory schools is not to get one's
self ready to pass an examination, but to get one's self ready to read
Latin; and if that aim be intelligently pursued, the examination
in writing Latin will take care of itself. The pursuit, however,
should be incessant. Every day a number of sentences based upon the
author in use at the time should be written by various members of the class,
sent to the board for the purpose. Time can easily be obtained by
having the writing going on while the class is reciting upon the review;
after which, corrections should be called for from the class in general.

Throughout the work of the preparatory school, the teacher should insist
upon it that what the pupil is primarily aiming at is to learn to read
in a great literature, with as slight a barrier as possible between him
and his author; and he should make himself regard cases, modes, and
tenses, and make his students regard them, as keys to the literature,
as direct conveyors of thought from mind to mind. How the
last may most effectively and rapidly be done, I have tried to show.
This is all that strictly falls within the scope of the present pamphlet.
But I cannot forbear to add that the teacher who is conducting a class
through Caesar, or Cicero, or Virgil, should never lose sight of the fact
that his work is not wholly preparatory, — that he
is already dealing with a great literature. The more he
can make his students see that it is a great literature, through the virtue
of his own enjoyment of it, and, in particular, through the power with
which he can read it to them in the Latin, and the power with which he
can train them to read it themselves, the easier will be his task, and
the richer its palpable rewards; and the greater will be his contribution
to the sum total of the classical education.

This brings us to the university, with its manifold aims, — the study
of the literature and of the history of its development, the comparative
study of the forms and the syntax, the study of ancient history from the
sources, the study of ancient life, of ancient art, etc. All these
various pursuits, however, rest ultimately mainly upon the
power to read Latin with ease and speed.

1 I question whether it would not be better
to use a smaller vocabulary in the first few lessons than some of the books
employ, aiming rather, by the varied repetition of a comparatively few
words in the simple constructions of subject, direct object, indirect object,
and predicate, at giving the student a real facility in the grasping of
meanings and the conveying of meanings through inflections. It is
hard for the young mind to get this facility when dealing with things so
new if it is encumbered at the same time with having to handle a large
vocabulary.

2 Here lies the answer to the question, What
is the good of going through the extra difficulty of understanding Latin
without seeing it, when all that we aim at is to be able to read the printed
page? Without saying anything about the greater sense of reality,
and the greater interest which this way of dealing with the language brings
with it, one might make the matter clear by supposing the case to be reversed.
If English were a dead language, and Roman boys were learning to read it
under Roman teachers who had mastered it, it would obviously be a very
slow proceeding to pick it all to pieces and rearrange it into the Roman
order as a means of understanding it. The most courteous ghost among
us would laugh in the teacher's face if he were to visit a Roman schoolroom
and find that sort of thing going on; just as undoubtedly the most
courteous of Roman ghosts must laugh — unless, perhaps, his sense of grief
over the waste of opportunity gets the better of his sense of humor — if
ever he visits a modern schoolroom when a class is reading an oration of
his great countryman. Just as he would surely say to us that this
was precisely the way never to learn to read Latin, so our English-speaking
ghost would beg the teacher to give all that business up, and to use some
means to make it absolutely inevitable that the student should accept our
English order of expression, to the end that he might really learn to read
the language; and this means would necessarily be the trying to understand
at hearing, first sentences of graded difficulty, then continuous passages
of the literature.

The Art of Reading Latin: How To Teach It. An address delivered before the associated academic principals of the State of New York, December 28, 1886. William Gardner Hale, professor of Latin in Cornell University. 1887. Ginn and Company. Boston.

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